Have a cup of coffee, take a bath, do some physical exercises... That’s what users wouldn’t like to do while a website is loading. According to statistics, people leave a website that loads longer than 3 seconds.

A snail, a turtle, a slowpoke... These are the most innocent things users may say about your low-speed website that you wouldn’t like to hear. Polite users won’t say anything but go to your competitors anyway.

User-unfriendly, not-worth-to-be-ranked-higher-than-the-100th-page... These complicated epithets belong to the “artificial intellect” — in other words, that’s what Google thinks about a snail-like website.

Don’t like the idea of it being YOUR website? Let’s see what your site “speedometer” shows: is your site ready for a run to success or just for snail races? In any case, keep calm. Everything can be improved! There are tools to test and optimize your website’s speed that will let you explore, find out the problematic areas and fix them to make your website “fly”! So let’s start the engines!

1. Google Page Speed Insights

Believe it or not, Google is not a heartless machine. It can be strict in its ranking preferences but it offers tools for improving your performance which is considered an important ranking factor. Google Page Speed Insights scans your website, tells you its load time, finds its weak points which make it slower, and offers suggestions on how to fix them. In less than a minute, you will get many useful instructions on how to make your website faster. The instructions are categorized by importance.

2. YAHOO’S YSLOW

Yahoooo! Let’s go! Your website will run more quickly if you follow another famous search engine’s tips. YAHOO’S YSLOW assesses your website’s performance and loading speed on the basis of Yahoo’s own set of criteria which make it slower or faster for visitors. This easy-to-use speed testing anf optimization tool provides performance grades on these criteria, as well as advice on how to improve them. For the better picture, the information is presented in charts and graphs, and is graded by importance.

3. Page Scoring

Get rid of the things that slow you down! Here’s one of the simplest online tools for your website’s speed testing, Page Scoring. It scans your site and tells you how quickly it loads with all the HTML, CSS and Js files related to a user’s request. It also gives you links to all these files and shows exactly how much time is “eaten” by the loading of particular files and content. This is a great hint for you to be aware of your basic site performance capabilities starting with the web server response time and ending with the files list of page's elements that steal your page loading speed.

4. Pingdom

This tool to test and optimize your website's speed and performance is not so easy for anyone, but very informative and rich in features. It examines your website’s overall requests number, loading time of all files as well as displays the useful data related to these files. It assesses your website’s overall performance, shows the detected problems and offers practical fixing solutions. Both the errors and the solutions are graded by their importance. The data is presented in a visual chart for your convenience.

5. GTmetrix

GTmetrix speed testing and optimization tool provides users with a handy grading system. Besides evaluating PageSpeed and YSlow score, this online service also gives in-depth grades to each point in its checklist accordingly. Collecting all the necessary data related to the server request, it displays its problem-fixing and speed-enhancing recommendations together with the corresponding URLs which is very convenient. It also has a feature of recording a video with the test results and tracking a history of previous checks.

6. Web Page Test

If you use the Web Page Test tool, lots of important details related to the loading of every your website’s object can be presented in waterfall charts and followed with convenient screenshots. You will get your performance grades and a checklist of fixing recommendations in the order of importance. One of cool features of Web Page Test speed testing and optimization tool is that you can select the countries in which you want to check your website’s performance.

7. Monitis

Check out a simple but effective tool to measure your website’s performance. Within just one minute, it scans all website’s elements involved in the response to the request and shows you the response time of every element. A nice advantage of Monitis is that it checks your website’s speed from 3 different geographical regions at once, so you can get the idea of its average loading speed across the globe.